Students build positive memories of literacy activities when they take turns taking home a book bag stuffed with items to encourage literacy interactions with their families.
Have Journal...Will Travel: Promoting Family Involvement in Literacy
Listen, Look, and Learn: An Information-Gathering Process
After listening to and discussing the story Score One for the Sloths, primary students research the sloth. Students use a variety of resources, including an information wheel graphic organizer.
Read Across America Day: Celebrate a Nation of Diverse Readers
Bring the celebration of reading and literacy into your classroom, library, school, and home all year long.
Trading Card Creator
This tool provides a fun and useful way to explore a variety of topics such as a character in a book, a person or place from history, or even a physical object. An excellent tool to for summarizing or as a prewriting exercise for original stories.
Power of Picture Books, The: Using Content Area Literature in Middle School
Featuring descriptions and activities for fifty exceptional titles, Mary Jo Fresch and Peggy Harkins offer a wealth of ideas for harnessing the power of picture books to improve reading and writing in the content areas.
Reading for Learning: Using Discipline-Based Texts to Build Content Knowledge
Heather Lattimer provides practical, classroom-tested approaches to helping students access and critically respond to content-based texts.
Reading & Writing & Teens: A Parent's Guide to Adolescent Literacy
Offering advice from a host of experts in adolescent literacy, this book helps answer real questions from parents across the country about how to best support their teens as readers and writers.
Nonfiction Roundup
With each annual crop of new nonfiction, teens have the opportunity to discover and explore new disciplinary worlds. Tune in to hear about an array of recently-published nonfiction titles that will engage teens in learning about history, science, economics, and medicine. You'll hear about junk food and advertising, the atomic bomb and civil rights, bird watching and volcanoes – books written in a variety of formats for a variety of teen readers.
A Conversation with Coe Booth
Tune in to hear how Coe Booth worked through the challenges of writing Bronxwood, how she makes sense of her characters' actions, and how her books challenge readers to develop critical social consciousness.
New and Noteworthy Nonfiction
Tune in to hear about newly-published biographies, memoirs, and essay collections as well as titles that explore history, science, and social issues.
A Conversation with Sara Zarr
Tune in to hear Sara Zarr discuss religious faith and some of the thinking behind her newest novel, Once Was Lost.
Life's Journeys: Help Along the Way
Tap into teen and preteen readers' interest in adolescent-mentor relationships with these recommendations!
Connection Web
Students use this printout to expand on connections they have made to a text and use those details to write essays or create projects about the text.
Double-Entry Journal
This printout helps students record ideas and situations from texts in one column, and their reactions in the second, thus making a connection between the text and themselves, another text, or the world.
RAFT Writing Template
Students can utilize this printout to organize their writing as they learn to use the RAFT strategy. This printout enables students to clearly define their role, audience, format, and topic for writing.
Seed Discussion Organizer
Students can utilize this printout to organize their thoughts as a new concept or content is introduced through a Seed Discussion. This printout readies students to acquire new knowledge by organizing what they know and what they're prepared to learn.
A Conversation with Rita Williams-Garcia
It's rare to find historical fiction that weaves rich period detail into the lives of memorable and endearing characters, but Rita Williams-Garcia's middle-grade novels One Crazy Summer and P.S. Be Eleven do just that. Tune in to hear Rita explain how she drew on personal and historical contexts to develop her characters and tell their story. You'll also hear about her great love for her work and her commitment to spending as long as it takes to get the story right.
Making Connections
In this strategy guide, you'll learn to model how students can make three different kinds of connections (text-to-text, text-to-self, text-to-world). Students then use this knowledge to find their own personal connections to a text.